Lucy (aka Lady Lucia), our 13-year-old Sheltie, is one tough little broad.
Unlike the other lesser mammals in the house, she loves being vacuumed.
In fact, you have to vacuum her first, before she'll give you access to the rug.
It doesn't appear to be genetic; her offspring all remain terrified of vacuums.
So at least one threat to humanity has been thwarted.

Today, Michele Bachmann said her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, is the
birthplace of John Wayne, when actually it's the birthplace of serial
killer John Wayne Gacy. Then she said her favorite sitcom from the 80s
is "Charles Manson in Charge."-Conan O'Brien

In a democracy, you say what you like and do what you're told.-Dave
Barry

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one
discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until
one is stopped.-Norman Mailer

Golf is not a sport. It's men in ugly pants, walking.-Rosie
O'Donnell

When choosing between two evils, be advised: if you use the
"eeny-meeny-miny-mo" method, you'll always end up with the second one.-John
Alejandro King (The Covert Comic)

Death before dishonor. One thing at a time.-John Alejandro King
(The Covert Comic)

Rather than giveth and taketh away, maybe it would be best for all
concerned if the Lord just held on to it.-John Alejandro King
(The Covert Comic)

The most popular software for writing fiction isn't Word. It's Excel.-Brian
Alvey

A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice
person.-Dave Barry

You have no birthday because you have always lived; you were never born,
and never will die. You are not the child of the people you call mother
and father, but their fellow-adventurer on a bright journey to
understand the things that are.-Richard Bach

Life tells you nothing. It shows you everything.-Richard Bach

Decide promptly, but never give any reasons. Your decision may be right,
but your reasons are sure to be wrong.-Lord William Murray
Mansfield

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.-John
D. Rockefeller

We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven into an
age of unreason if we dig deep into our history and remember we are not
descended from fearful men.-Edward R. Murrow

Sometimes someone has to hurt you deep enough to make you realize how
better your life is without them in it.-Amanda Adriani

Opportunity is sometimes hard to recognize if you're only looking for a
lucky break.-Monta Crane

Did you see that video where a crying baby is handed to President Obama?
As soon as the president holds the baby it stops crying. Do you know how
rare that is these days; that a politician is handed a baby from a crowd
and it's not his?-Jay Leno

(YouTube video: Barack Obama, The Baby Whisperer)

That's pretty amazing. The baby stopped crying as soon as the president
held it. Obama should try that with John Boehner.-Jay Leno

Sarah Palin has canceled the rest of her bus trip around America. She
had to quit before she got to Mount Rushmore and somebody asked her to
name the Presidents.-Jay Leno

John McCain made his claim that illegal immigrants started the Arizona
wildfires without doing his research. The last time he did that we got
Sarah Palin.-Jay Leno

It has now been revealed that Newt Gingrich had a second line of credit
at Tiffany's for up to a million dollars. That sounds like a lot until
you remember that Congress has a line of credit with China for up to
$14.3 trillion.-Jay Leno

More bad news for Newt Gingrich. One week after his campaign staff quit,
his campaign finance team quit. In fact, Newt was going to pull out of
the race, but today the guy who writes his concession speeches quit.-Jay
Leno

According to new polls, 66 percent of Americans believe the country is
headed in the wrong direction. But the good news is, gas is so expensive
and traffic is so bad that we won't get there for a long time.-Jay
Leno

Today Sarah Palin canceled her bus tour, reportedly canceling dates in
Iowa, South Carolina, and New Hampshire. When asked why, Palin answered:
'It turns out those places are nowhere near each other.'-Conan
O'Brien

In a new videotape message, Texas Gov. Rick Perry urges his supporters
to follow him on 'Tweeter.' After hearing about it, John McCain laughed
and said, 'What an idiot! It's 'The Tweeter.'-Conan O'Brien

Newt Gingrich bragged on his third wife, saying, 'She plays the French
horn.' Then things got awkward when he added, 'If you know what I mean.'-Conan
O'Brien

Newt Gingrich announced he was running for president. His top advisers
quit, and then his campaign fundraisers all quit. Newt was thinking, 'I
don't need this, I'll just put it all on my Tiffany's credit card.'-David
Letterman

New Republican Presidential candidate Jon Huntsman is fluent in Chinese.
In a short period of time the Republicans have come quite a long way.
The last Republican president wasn't even fluent in English.-David
Letterman

Bristol Palin released her much-anticipated memoir called 'Not Afraid of
Life: My Journey So Far.' Bristol said that Levi Johnston cheated on her
but then made it up to her by buying designer rain boots. Things are
different up there, I guess.-Jimmy Kimmel

President Obama will be in New York tomorrow night for a fundraiser at
the Broadway musical 'Sister Act.' Meanwhile, Sarah Palin will be in
town to do some hunting at 'The Lion King.'-Jimmy Fallon

New York Gov. Andy Cuomo will hold a special election on September 13 to
replace Anthony Weiner. Cuomo said, 'Anyone interested in the job should
e-mail me at... actually, you'd just better call.'-Jimmy Fallon

If you're one of those people who's bought into this "cloud computing"
business, you're an idiot.

"The Cloud" has been around forever. We used to call them distributed
systems: a bunch of independent computers connected by a network or
networks, which allow programs and data to be stored and/or executed on
remote machines. If the remote machines are working, that is, and if
the network can reach them.

As computer scientist Leslie Lamport said a few decades ago- yes,
this is a very old idea- "A distributed system is one in which the
failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own
computer unusable."

If you're one of those trendy types who lives in the Cloud- stores all
of your photos, contacts, e-mails and critical data there- because you
believe it relieves you of the responsibility of backing up and managing
it yourself- wake up and smell the metal oxide being scraped off your
disk drive platters.

You'll endure periods when you won't be able to get to your stuff,
because the provider's website is down or the idiot next door backed his
pick-up truck over the Comcast box.

And you will eventually suffer a critical data loss. I recall an
ad posted by a storage company about 20 years ago that's still valid
today. "There are two types of users in this world: Those who have
lost data and those who will lose data."

Distributed computing is a marvelous convenience. It permits me to work
for my employer in Chicago from my home in the South Hills of
Pittsburgh. Someone in the office on Wacker Drive can dial my four-digit
extension, and- thanks to the wonders of the Internet- four hundred
miles away, the phone in my basement office rings.

But things can, and do, go wrong. Perhaps I'm a bit more paranoid
because it's my livelihood, but I take no chances on data losses or
communications failures.

If a call to my office phone rings more than three times, it's
simultaneously forwarded to three different numbers: my cell phone, home
phone, and the Onstar phone in my car. As long as the phone switch in
the Chicago office is working, and I'm in my home, car, or somewhere
with my cell, I get the call. The last office call I missed that ended
up in voice mail was during the blizzard in February, 2010. And that was
a wrong number.

Every e-mail to and from my office account gets automatically copied to
a special Gmail account. Business e-mail, along with mail from my
personal Gmail, Yahoo, and XO accounts, are downloaded at two-minute
intervals to Microsoft Outlook on my local machine here in Pittsburgh.
They're also available through the web interface to those respective
services as well. If I'm anywhere near a computer or smart phone, I can
get to any of my e-mail accounts. And if my business, Gmail, Yahoo or XO
accounts should somehow become inaccessible or are deleted, I still have
copies of everything locally.

I connect to my workstation in Chicago via GoToMyPC, which is
phenomenally reliable. But when the Internet is inaccessible, I still
need to work. That's why critical directories on my Chicago workstation
are also mirrored on my Pittsburgh machines.

The two computers in my home office are backed up 12 times a day to two
different online backup accounts. Local backup software writes changes
to external hard drives every 10 minutes or so. Twice a week, I do full
image backups to external drives that are identical to the ones in the
machines. If the computer drives fail, I pop out the bad unit, pop in
the one with the latest image backup, do an incremental restore of stuff
that's changed since the last image, and in under an hour or two, it's
like nothing happened.

I hear you saying to yourself, "Now this is a responsible
professional." (Actually, I hear you saying "Is he a frigging lunatic?
Does he have some weird form of OCD or something?" But I'll just pretend
I didn't hear you.)

Yes, I'm a bit over the top when it comes to backups and redundancy, but
then computers are an integral part of my life. I've been using them
every day since 1982 when I fired up my first machine, a 4K Radio Shack
Color Computer. My entire professional and personal lives reside on
them. Literally. Except for special legal documents like deeds, titles
and wills, everything is digital. And yes, I do have scanned
copies of the deeds, etc. Just in case.

True, you probably don't need five copies of all of your Gmail messages
(Gmail interface, Microsoft Outlook, online backup, incremental disk
backup, disk image backup). But you should have at least one.

If you're a Windows user, it's simple. Keep everything under the My
Documents folder. Subscribe to an online backup provider like Mozy or
Carbonite, or a branded service that comes with your computer, like Dell
or HP. Most are free, or relatively low cost. Make the investment.

Most experts recommend keeping both on-site and off-site copies of your
data. If that's too anal for you, just go with the on-line route. Having
a disk backup of critical data three feet away from your laptop isn't
much help when a fire reduces them both to a pool of molten plastic and
metal.

Too much trouble? Too much money? Really?

I regard people who don't back up their data with the same contempt as
those who let their dogs run loose or never change the oil in their cars.

You can post photos, videos and your current wardrobe, dinner menu and
GPS coordinates to Twitter and Facebook, master the intricacies of Mafia
Wars and Farmville, but can't take five minutes to go through the
simple, step-by-step process of setting up a backup procedure for your
data?

And the horse you rode in on, pally.

I'm ashamed to say that when someone calls me with a data loss problem
and they admit they haven't backed up since they bought their machine,
I'm tempted to tell them they deserve their fate.

Even more infuriating is when someone has gone to the trouble to set up
a backup procedure for these cretinous oafs, but it's no longer working
because the disk is full or the online account limit was reached.
Invariably, at boot up time there's a prominent warning window the user
blithely clicks and closes without reading. Betcha they also ignore the
"Check Engine Now" lights in their cars, then have the temerity to ask
surprised when the mechanic tells them that instead of an engine they
now have a solid block of goo-infused, petroleum-encrusted junk metal
under the hood.

It's a matter of money and responsibility, pure and simple. The cloud's
popular because it allows companies to shift responsibility to someone
else, generally at a lower cost. But how much have you saved when you
come in one day to find out that you can't get to your programs and
data? How much time have you saved when your computer crashes and you
spend weeks begging relatives to send you copies of family pictures? How
much time and money will it cost you to replace your multi-gigabyte,
3,000-song iTunes library?

I'm a computer professional. I've been in the business 30 years. On six
separate occasions, I've had major system failures and data losses that
completely wiped out everything I had stored on my machines. I learned
quite early that backing up my data is as essential as having auto and
homeowners insurance and paying the mortgage and utilities every month.
Ignore your responsibilities, and you will pay dearly for your
indolence.

It's time you learn that, too.

A Google search for "cloud failures," limited to the last week, returned 379,000
results. Look at a couple of the articles. Recognize any names?

Don't be fooled. If you examine it closely, the Cloud sounds too good to
be true.

Several readers have taken me to task for not adding the quotations
which appear from time to time in "Quote of the Day" postings to the KGB
Quotations database.

Here's the deal:

To qualify for inclusion in the database, a quotation has to be fairly
exceptional, and/or relatively timeless. Consider yesterday's Quote of
the Day:

In her new book, Bristol Palin reveals she lost her virginity on a
camping trip. Bristol said she named her son "Trip," because "Camping"
seemed like a dumb name.-Conan O'Brien

This entry has a couple problems. First, it's a joke, although that's
not an automatic reason for exclusion. What disqualifies it is its
topicality. It references a recently released book written by a
quasi-public figure who (one fervently prays) will eventually fade from
public memory.

For database inclusion, a quotation has to have legs. Although, to be
totally honest, the real determining factor is my mood at the time I
encounter the quotation. So it's totally arbitrary. Hey, it's my
database. Deal with it.

There's really only one hard and fast rule: No Deepak Chopra.

----------

Recently added to the KGB Quotations Database:

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid
the trap of thinking you have something to lose.-Steve Jobs

The opposite of success is not failure, it is name-dropping.-Nassim
Taleb

Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, National
Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System crashed the stock
market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in taxpayer-funded
bailouts, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions of
dollars in bonuses, and paid no taxes? Yeah, me neither. Pass it on.-Proud
of Being Liberal (Facebook Group)

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesterday, when Larry
O'Brien and John Garry ruled Pittsburgh morning drive time radio. In
this exciting episode from November, 1981: a simple 30 second live ad
turns into three and a half minutes of chaos as Larry loses it
completely.

"To balance the system, Fox has to be the purest form of right-wing resin,
because of how heavy left-wing America is. Hollywood, comedians, every single
news organization, the Internet, facts, history, science- it's all just left-wing
bull****, man! Each one of them designed purely to shut down conservatives..."

Once you wade through all the prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses, you're
able to figure out that the man didn't rob the bank with the help of the bank manager
and a passing motorist. Rather, they assisted the police to apprehend the
thief.

This 40-word jigsaw of a sentence is almost German in its construction. You have to get
to the end of the sentence to find out where you're going. As Mark Twain said in A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, "Whenever the literary German dives into a
sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side
of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.".

As allergy sufferers know, this season's been particularly bad. My daughter and I have been
dosed by our respective physiscians with enough corticosteroids to dry up the Mississippi basin.
Despite these heroic efforts, we're always "on the edge." One tiny challenge to our
hair-trigger immune systems can easily bust a hole in our shaky pharmaceutical dykes.

My levee burst at about 4 am when Pumpkin, our evil cat, apparently decided she wanted to fall
asleep on her favorite piece of endothermic furniture, namely me. She first sat on my head, providing
my eyes, sinuses and upper respiratory system with a more than moderate dose of fur and dander.
She then moved on to the only exposed human body part on the bed- my
lower right leg. As she settled into place, I apparently startled her by sneezing. She attempted to
maintain her stability in the cute way cats do, by extending her quasi-lethal, razor-like
claws quite firmly into my calf.

My leg jerked upward in a powerful reflex action, catapulting the accursed feline into the bed's
headboard, where her trajectory was modified in such a way that she was deposited into a mass of
sleeping shelties Who Were Not Amused.

Somehow the rest of the household remained unconscious during the festivities, which involved
nearly a half-dozen small furry mammals cascading down the steps in high dudgeon, accompanied by a
greater mammal using the dark, unpleasant part of his vocabulary in an extended, hissed exhalation
that thankfully did not involve the larnyx. In the meantime,
my calf started erupting in hives and producing an itching sensation reminiscent of the chest-bursting
scene in Alien.

So, at 4:10 am, I'm downing prednisone pills like M&Ms, slathering hydrocortisone cream on
my leg, giving myself an albuterol treatment and squirting naphazoline in my eyes. The dogs are under
my desk, alternately cowering in fear and growling at the cat, who, given the supremely narcissistic
tendencies of her species, is lying on the spare office chair, staring at me in dull curiosity
through drooping eyelids.

Going to church won't be of any help. I recently joined the Unitarians, so I can no longer invoke
the wrath of some supernatural being to rain down flaming justice on those who afflict me.

I'll just have to settle for extreme grumpiness for the balance of the day.

A father is someone who carries pictures where his money used to be.-Unattributed

A realist is a man who insists on making the same mistakes his
grandfather did.-Disraeli, Benjamin

All fathers are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers and
fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home fathers, with their
real, unspeakable power. There is more to fathers than meets the eye.-Atwood,
Martin

By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually
has a son who thinks he's wrong.-Wadsworth, Charles

Diogenes struck the father when the son swore.-Burton, Robert

Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its
grandfathers.-Mumford, Lewis

Every time I find a girl who can cook like my mother, she looks like my
father.-Randall, Tony

Father's Day is like Mother's Day, except the gift is cheaper.-Lieberman,
Gerald F.

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love the most is soap-on-a-rope.-Cosby,
Bill

Fathers have a unique and irreplaceable role in the lives of children.-Bush,
George W.

Fathers should neither be seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis
for family life.-Wilde, Oscar

For years I thought my father was a hunchback. Turns out he didn't know
suspenders were adjustable.-Kelly, Bill

Genetics explains why you look like your father, and if you don't, why
you should.-Unattributed

Hello. My name is Oedipus. You are my father. Prepare to die.-Lebovitz,
Nancy

Humor is always based on a modicum of truth. Have you ever heard a joke
about a father-in-law?-Clark, Dick

I don't have prejudice against myself. My father was a white and my
mother was black. Them call me half-caste or whatever. Me don't dip on
nobody's side. Me don't dip on the black man's side nor the white man's
side. Me dip on God's side, the one who create me and cause me to come
from black and white.-Marley, Bob

I once complained to my father that I didn't seem to be able to do
things the same way other people did. Dad's advice? "Margo, don't be a
sheep. People hate sheep. They eat sheep."-Kaufman, Margo

If a child looks like his father, that's heredity. If he looks like a
neighbor, that's environment.-Unattributed

If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.-Kipling,
Rudyard

My father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic.-Milligan,
Spike

My father was frightened of his father, I was frightened of my father,
and I am damned well going to see to it that my children are frightened
of me.-King George V

My father's a proctologist. My mother is an abstract artist. That's how
I view the world.-Bernhard, Sandra

My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six.-Alda, Alan

No man is responsible for his father. That is entirely his mother's
affair.-Turnbull, Margaret

Noble fathers have noble children.-Euripides

Rich men's sons are seldom rich men's fathers.-Kaufmann, Herbert

The similarities between me and my father are different.-Berra,
Dale

The worst misfortune that can happen to an ordinary man is to have an
extraordinary father.-O'Malley, Austin

This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than
fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more
certain that they are their own.-Aristotle

Photos of Congressman Weiner have surfaced of him
cross-dressing in college, in bra and pantyhose, proving
that even back then he knew he wanted to be a
Congressman.-Jay Leno

It was on this day in 1992 that Vice President Dan Quayle
misspelled the word 'potato,' thus paving the way for Sarah
Palin.-Jay Leno

According to a new report, only 12 percent of American
high school students can pass a basic history test. That's
the lowest percentage since our country was founded in
1922.-Jay Leno

Congressman Weiner’s wife returned today from her
diplomatic trip to Ethiopia. She said she got really tired
of Ethiopians telling her, 'I feel so sorry for you.'-Conan O'Brien

A new study shows that only 35 percent of fourth-graders
know the purpose of the Declaration of Independence. When
she heard this, Sarah Palin said, 'How are they supposed to
know about something that happened 20 years ago.'-Conan O'Brien

A Tea Party group has a summer camp for kids, the only
one where they sit around the campfire and tell scary
stories about taxing the top 2%.-Conan O'Brien

Rep. Michele Bachmann once said that gay people lead a
very sad life. Apparently, she has never celebrated
Halloween in San Francisco.-Conan O'Brien

Have you seen these Republican presidential candidates? I
bet Obama is sorry now that he spent all that money on the
new birth certificate.-David Letterman

A new survey found that 87 percent of high school seniors
are less than proficient in U.S. history. Not me. In fact,
when I was a senior, I did a 10-page paper on my favorite
president, George Jefferson.-Jimmy Fallon

It turns out that 70 percent of guns found in Mexico
actually come from the U.S. Meanwhile, 70 percent of people
found in the U.S. actually come from Mexico.-Jimmy Fallon

One more vote is needed in the New York State Senate to
legalize gay marriage. That one vote could be the Republican
Senator from Staten Island. If he’s willing to be known for
the rest of his career as the Staten Island Fairy.-Jon Stewart

Aside from the Thurber hounds, by far the best cartoon dogs are by George Booth, whose
work has appeared in The New Yorker for decades. I love their postures and
expressions, which manage to be simultaneously understated, exaggerated, and dead-on accurate.
The absurdist captions are a delight as well.

Before I begin, I must point out that behind me sits a highly admired
President of the United States and decorated war hero while I, a cable
television talk show host, have been chosen to stand here and impart
wisdom. I pray I never witness a more damning example of what is wrong
with America today.-Conan O'Brien, giving the commencement
address at Dartmouth. Video here.

The word cynic comes from the Greek κυνικός, kynikos, or "dog-like."
The original Cynics had a personal philosophy that emphasized virtue and
moral freedom in liberation from desire.
They also circled three times before lying down.

Before Hugh
Laurie (June 11, 1959) achieved fame and fortune as House,
MD, he was well-known in Britain as a comic actor of Pythonesque
stature and not a half-bad musician. His parody of 60s protest songs,
"All We Gotta Do Is..." is a brilliant take on self-righteous
folksingers whose true insight leaves a bit to be desired.

The official term is neologism, but most people my age call them "Sniglets," from a segment of the old 1980s HBO show
Not Necessarily The News created
by comedian Rich Hall who, coincidentally, turns
57 today. Some examples:

Adam 69: Two police cars, parked next to each other, facing opposite directions, in such a way that the drivers side doors are only inches from each other, allowing the officers to chat with each other while waiting for a traffic violation to happen.

Alcolean: The point just before a drunk person starts to stumble.

Ancinemation: The curious act of waiting in line to see a movie and watching exiting movie goers' reactions to see if they liked the movie or not.

Anniversorry: The act of buying presents especially diamonds to make up for a forgotten aniversary.

Baldage: The accumulation of hair in a drain after bathing or showering.

Bevemeter: The distance a coaster will stick to the bottom of a wet glass before falling to the table.

Bozone: The substance surrounding stupid people which repels intelligent ideas or accurate information.

Cheedle: The yellow residue from Cheetos that stains your fingers.

Cheeriomagnetism: The force which causes Cheerios to clump together in small groups.

Cinemuck: The sticky substance on the floor of a movie theater.

Destinesia: The simultaneous acts of arriving at a place while forgetting why you went there.

Doork: A person who tries to enter through a door clearly marked 'Exit'.

Downpause: The split second interruption of rain as you drive your car under a bridge.

Ellaceleration: The futile attempt to make an elevator arrive more quickly by repeatedly pushing the call button.

Expresshole: The ***hole in the express lane at the store who has way more items in his cart than the limit for the lane.

Foreploy: Misrepresentations told for the purpose of getting laid.

Icealanche: The avalanche of ice that occurs when a glass or cup is tipped up to drink the last of the liquid.

Idiolocation: The spot on the map marked "You are here."

Idiot Box: The part of the envelope that tells a person where to place the stamp when they can't quite figure it out for themselves.

Lactomangulation: Manhandling the "open here" spout on a milk carton so badly that one has to resort to using the "illegal" side.

Magnacarta: The lonely car in lot that always attracts shopping carts

Nerkle: Someone who leaves their Christmas lights/decorations up all year.

Pre-autoistic McConsumption: The tendency to start eating your french fries in the car on your way home.

A good way for ineffective people to cling to power in an organization
is by creating a monopoly on information.

A mission statement is defined as "a long awkward sentence that
demonstrates management's inability to think clearly." All good
companies have one.

Ambiguity succeeds where Honesty dares not venture.

An optimist is simply a pessimist with no job experience.

Anything that makes employees unhappy makes the stock price go up.

Are leaders born or made? And if they're made, can we return them under
warranty?

Change is good. You go first.

Consultants will return your calls, because it's all billable time to
them.

Decisions are made by people who have time, not people who have talent.

Eighty percent of good management is hiring the right people. The other
20 percent is getting out of their way.

Employees want to feel they participated in the formation of the
business plan. This scam is called "buy in," and it's essential for
reminding the employees that if anything goes wrong, it's their fault.

Engineers understand that their appearance only bothers other people and
therefore it is not worth optimizing.

Every layer of management exists for the sole purpose of warning us
about the layer above.

Executives hate talking to employees because they always bring up a
bunch of unresolvable issues. Salespeople just buy the executives lunch.
It's no contest.

Free will is an illusion. People always choose the perceived path of
greatest pleasure.

Freedom's just another word for not caring about the quality of your
work.

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish,
and he'll buy a funny hat. Talk to a hungry man about fish, and you're a
consultant.

I believe everybody in the world should have guns. Citizens should have
bazookas and rocket launchers too. I believe that all citizens should
have their weapons of choice. However, I also believe that only I should
have the ammunition. Because frankly, I wouldn't trust the rest of the
goobers with anything more dangerous than string.

I cried because I did not have an office with a door, until I met a man
who had no cubicle.

I don't understand what you do. Therefore, it must be simple.

I get funnier looking every year and I'd like to think it's part of an
overall plan to seize power instead of some pathetic aging problem.

I've noticed that when a new policy mentions me by name, it's never a
good thing.

If you can't get rid of bad employees, as a last resort put the poor
performers in charge of the United Way campaign and let everybody suffer
with you.

If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show
you how it's done.

If you notice a lot of attention being given to process improvement,
it's a sure sign that all the smart employees have left the company and
those who remain are desperately trying to find a "process" that is so
simple that the boneheads who remain can handle it.

If you spend all of your time arguing with people who are nuts, you'll
be exhausted and the nuts will still be nuts.

In Japan, employees occasionally work themselves to death. It's called
Karoshi. I don't want that to happen to anybody in my department. The
trick is to take a break as soon as you see a bright light and hear dead
relatives beckon.

In the future, more people will work for themselves, creating a huge
market for bizarre products.

In the future, most democratic countries will be led by tall people with
good hair.

In the future, the most important job skill will be a lack of ethics.

In the old days, quality was just an empty word meaning "good."
Eventually, it evolved into a complicated method for transferring your
money to business consultants.

Intelligence has much less practical application than you'd think.

It's funny to me that I have to prove to the banks that I'm
honest.

It's hard to argue with the government. Remember, they run the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, so they must know a thing or two about
satisfying women.

It's vital for employees to accept the "buy-in" process. That way
management has someone to blame when things go wrong.

Large corporations welcome innovation and individualism in the same way
the dinosaurs welcomed large meteors.

Leadership is nature's way of removing morons from the productive flow.

Managers are like cats in a litter box. They instinctively shuffle
things around to conceal what they've done.

Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational
things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the
principle of lotteries, dating and religion.

Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge.

On time. Zero defects. Pick one.

People are idiots.

Re-engineering is like performing an appendectomy on yourself. It hurts
quite a bit, you might not know exactly how to do it, and there's a good
chance you won't survive it.

Reality is always controlled by the people who are most insane.

Remember, you can't be wrong unless you take a position. Don't fall into
that trap.

Reporters are faced with the daily choice of painstakingly researching
stories or writing whatever people tell them. Both approaches pay the
same.

Responsibility is not power.

Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. But
you still don't want to get any on you.

Success is the happy feeling you get between the time you do something
and the time you tell a woman what you did.

The best jobs are those that have results that cannot be measured.

The children are our future. And that is why, ultimately, we're screwed.

The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways. But he uses a base
ten counting system and likes round numbers.

The entire economic system depends on the fact that people are willing
to do unpleasant things in return for money.

The future depends on assumptions and assumptions are just stuff you
make up. No sense in knocking yourself out.

The longer you work here, diverse it gets.

The new CEO is always some tall white guy with no experience in your
business.

The purpose of analysis is to avoid making hard decisions. Therefore,
there can never be too much analysis.

The universe is mostly empty space, and so is your job.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

They can't break you if you don't have a spine.

We're a planet of nearly six billion ninnies living in a civilization
that was designed by a few thousand amazingly smart deviants.

Our oldest Sheltie, Déjà Vu, had a touch of insomnia last night and
decided to roam the house every hour or so.

Déjà's our Queen Mum and behaves accordingly. As de facto Equerry to The
Queen, it is my responsibility to insure her nocturnal excursions are
without incident.

Obstacles must be removed from her royal, impromptu itinerary. A cat
sleeping at the top of the cellar stairs, blocking Her Majesty's path?
It must be physically moved out of Her way, a potentially hazardous
chore and one that typically elicits a succint feline opinion on the
validity of canine royalty.

A sheltie of lesser rank in a potential napping area? Verbal orders are
generally sufficient. The younger ones move quickly, without comment.
The older ladies grumble under their breath. Especially Lady Lucia, just
a year younger then Déjà and a down-to-earth old girl with the swagger
of a bordello madame and an attitude to match. She moves out of the
Queen's way resentfully, a hint of a snarl on her lips. "Pretentious old
bitch," Lucy mutters in a Scottish canine dialect that is surprisingly
easy for even a human to understand.

In the midst of this Dance of the Lesser Mammals, I sneaked into the
refrigerator and snagged a piece of cold pizza, which I ate quickly to
avoid being sacked by the five Furballs of the Apocalypse. Double
pepperoni and a bit spicy, I knew I would pay later.

At dawn, Déjà was still asleep, but the others wanted to begin their
morning constitutionals. I let them out, then stared blankly though the
screen door. My stomach rumbled, starting a chain reaction that began a
relentless, gaseous descent.

Then it hit, a truly impressive, multi-second burst of trumpeting
flatulence that stopped the shelties dead in their tracks, even though
they had wandered to the far end of the yard.

A minute later, the electronic shrieking began.

I first thought it was a smoke alarm, but remembered I had pulled the
one in my office while I was replacing some suspended ceiling panels.
This sound was coming from the corner of the laundry room, on the
shelving unit that held old paint cans, assorted hardware, and... the
carbon monoxide/ natural gas alarm.

I was appalled and impressed, at both myself and the alarm.

Finally silencing the unit, I went back to the cellar door to find four
shelties quizically staring up at me. I let them in. They circled me
warily, nostrils flared, then headed back upstairs.

All except Lucy, who sat at my feet, giving me the same sneer she had
given Déjà a few hours earlier. "If you had shared the pizza, you
wouldn't have this problem," she growled/grumbled.

The gas detector gave a last condescending chirp. With a final
"grrplegrrpleruff," Lucy sauntered out of the laundry room and headed
for the dog bed under my desk.

Today in New York City, Sarah Palin had a meeting with
Donald Trump. Now, experts say if those two joined forces on
a Presidential ticket it would be the greatest gift ever
given to comedy.
-Craig Ferguson

Sarah Palin is driving all over the country in a bus, I
guess to pick up where Charlie Sheen left off.
-Jimmy Kimmel

Sarah Palin, on visiting Mt. Vernon, the home of George
Washington: "Even Piper was able to grasp the significance
of being in the presence of our first President- who had
such diverse interests- when she told me later: 'how hard
he must have worked to keep that farm going!'" Stephen
Colbert: "It's true. I cannot imagine how hard he worked
with no help other than his African volunteers."

Sarah Palin may run for President. Doesn’t that thought
make you nostalgic for last week when you only thought the
world was going to end?
-Jay Leno

This weekend Sarah Palin begins a nationwide bus tour,
which I think is a good way for her to learn the names of
all the states.
-Jay Leno

Harold Camping is now predicting that the world will end
in October. In show business terms, that means God has
picked us up for another 22 weeks.
-Jay Leno

Tim Pawlenty is running for President. I won't say he's
boring, but his Secret Service Code name is Al Gore.
-Jay Leno

The United States was able to find and kill Osama bin
Laden because of a tip from one of his wives. When she saw a
picture of his body, she said, "Now who can't drive the
car?"
-Conan O'Brien

The Supreme Court has upheld Arizona's law which
penalizes employers for hiring workers who are in the
country illegally. And in a related story, in Phoenix a head
of lettuce now costs 137 dollars.
-Jay Leno

President Obama was in Ireland last week. While he was
there, his Secret Service codename was, "the black guy
that's in Ireland."
-Conan O'Brien

Bristol Palin said she doesn't plan on having any more
babies anytime soon. Then she added, "But that never stopped
me before."
-Jimmy Fallon

How could the calculations be wrong? Camping used the most precise
method available: taking numbers at random from a 400 year old English
translation of a group of tangentially-related ancient Middle Eastern
texts, transcribed from Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic oral histories. That's
how I do my taxes!-Stephen Colbert on the failed end-of-the-world
prediction for May 21.

Has anyone ever stopped to consider the possibility that Sarah Palin and her family
are driving from town to town solving mysteries and unmasking monsters in haunted
amusement parks?-Jon Stewart on Sarah Palin's bus tour